Bede quotes from several classical authors, including Cicero, Plautus, Terenceclear, Virgil, Pliny the Elder, and the works of Dionysius Exiguus.

He also drew on Josephus’s Antiquities, and the works of Cassiodorus, and there was a copy of the Liber Pontificalis in Bede’s monastery. Bede would also have been familiar with more recent accounts such as Eddius Stephanus’s Life of Wilfrid, and anonymous Lives of Gregory the Great and Cuthbert. Bede’s account of the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons is drawn largely from Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae.

He used Constantius’s Life of Germanus as a source for Germanus’s visits to Britain. He also knew Orosius’s Adversus Paganus, and Gregory of Tours’ Historia Francorum, both Christian histories, & the work of Eutropius, a pagan historian. The monastery had an excellent library of 200 books (big for the time) and was a renowned centre of learning.ĥ97 Bede drew on earlier writers and had access to two works of Eusebius: the Historia Ecclesiastica, and also the Chronicon in a Latin translation. He was well-educated at the same monasteries he worked throughout his life. Bede was connected to men of noble ancestry which suggest that his childhood family was well-to-do and came from a noble family with Anglo-Saxon heritage. Bede’s was fortunate that his monastery had access to an impressive library of 200 books (a lot for the time) which included works by Eusebius, Orosius, and many others.ġ899 Bede’s scholarship was recognized when he was declared a Doctor of the Church, as the only Englishman to receive that honor from the Catholic Church.ħ31 Bede’s life is contained in the last chapter of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a history of the church in England was completed when he was 59. He undoubtedly contributed to English Christianity. Saint Bede = One of the few written histories of the early Dark AgeĬlick for Source Article on Bede (672-735) Famous English Monk that wrote History of Englandīede, a skilled linguist and translator, finishing his translation of the Gospel of John on his deathbed & was respected and referenced by Catholics and Lutherans during the bloody Wars of Religions.

Bede english history